This report on the educational concerns of American Indians and Alaskan Natives is part of a four-part study of minority education in the United States by the National Education Association (NEA). Data were gathered from site visits to a wide variety of schools and programs and from the testimony of 220 representatives of Indian organizations and…

This report on the educational concerns of blacks is part of a four-part study of minority education in the United States by the National Education Association (NEA). Data were gathered from four site visits to urban schools and from the testimony of 40 representatives of community and civil rights organizations, the business community, black…

This report assesses the relationship between teacher expectations and the achievement of black intermediate school students attending school in Fairfax County, Virginia, a relatively affluent part of the Washington, D.C., metropolitan Area. Information was culled from interviews with and observation of 46 black students, their peers, teachers,…

This manual was developed to provide a model for evaluating programs for handicapped preschoolers that can be used by all Maryland school districts regardless of size or resources. The model has five components: (1) how children are identified as handicapped; (2) what type of testing takes place before and after a child is placed in a program; (3)…

A new framework for designing qualitative studies is described to optimize the emergence, representation and presentation of insights. The framework, called Reflection Methodology, is presented as a "Conversational Paradigm" that includes four components--interviewer (researcher as participant); child, task situation, and observing…

A commonly held belief about reading instruction in the elementary grades is that students must first learn to read so that they will then utilize their reading skill to learn from written language and to acquire new ideas. Consequently most of the instructional time in the primary grades is spent in teaching students how to recognize words and…

This paper discusses findings of ecological studies of classroom learning drawn from the fields of anthropology, sociology, and ecological psychology. The aim of the studies is to illustrate the processes of teaching and learning rather than to establish generalizable rules for instruction by challenging the methodology and findings of traditional…

Our elementary secondary schools have hidden curricula which teach passivity, resistance to change, inflexibility, and submissive behavior in a world which is moving toward faster changes and heightened personal individuality. Class control with the teacher feeding information to the students like data to a computer can no longer be accepted as…

Teaching is by nature a complex activity filled with ambiguities and dilemmas. Teaching also is fundamentally a moral activity, making the dilemmas and ambiguities both pedagogical and moral in nature. This article describes one teacher's reflections on her efforts to resolve the dilemmas and ambiguities presented to her by the competing…

The focus of the present study is to examine the communication strategies used by learners and teachers in the foreign language classroom. The data is from introductory Spanish classrooms at the university level. The author analyzed the data for instances of communications strategies according to taxonomy developed for ESL studies. Important…

Research and educational policies have alerted teachers to the importance of multiliteracies. Communication in society today is characterised by rapidly changing and emergent forms of meaning-making in a context of increased cultural and linguistic diversity. This paper responds to these imperatives, releasing key findings of a critical…

In a study to evaluate an approach for improving the critical thinking skills of middle school science students, 60 students were given the assignment of completing three guided laboratory activities and writing a report for each. In writing their reports, students were expected to identify the manipulated variable, identify the responding…

Prekindergarten Head Start teachers were trained to administer the Learning Accomplishment Profile (LAP), an objective check list of development in seven areas: gross motor, fine motor manipulation and writing, social, self help, cognitive, and language skills. Data were collected from separate groups of 3, 4, and 5-year old children to ascertain…

In the "Learning and Teaching" course at the University of Waikato (New Zealand) College of Teacher Education, explorations are being conducted into the advantages of training student teachers to work, on a more genuinely collegial basis, with the college's cooperating teachers. The assumptions and objectives of the course focus on…

This module is designed to aid preservice teachers in their first student teaching experience. The module is composed of five learning experiences which enable participants to assess their feelings toward teaching by focusing on three module components: (1) getting to know the students; (2) analyzing the role and activities of a teacher; and (3)…